sport news IAN LADYMAN: We must salute the managers down the leagues who have been on the ... trends now
In football management just about everybody falls at some point. And when you do, much depends on your capacity to bounce. And that, in turn, depends on your hunger, your love and your willingness to give much of your life and energy to the game of football.
Some can’t do it. Or won’t. So we lose them. Or they turn up on TV. Others refuse to let go, to be thrown off the ride. So they follow the work and hope it brings them back to where they want to be.
Owen Coyle did that. He followed the work. From England to the US then back to England. To Scotland, India and, now, back to Scotland and the threshold of something quite significant.
To recap, Coyle was once a rising talent of management in this country. Thirteen years ago he brought Burnley to the top flight for the first time in 33 years and got there playing attractive football. They almost beat Tottenham in a League Cup semi-final.
But then, less than six months after that promotion, Coyle left Burnley for Bolton and, like a golfer who suddenly can’t find a fairway, his career inexplicably unravelled. Bolton didn’t work out. Nor did Wigan or Blackburn.
Queens Park manager Owen Coyle has been all over the globe during his management career
We must salute the managers throughout the leagues who have stuck on the roundabout
So for the Scot it was Houston Dynamo in America’s MLS and Chennaiyin and Jamshed-pur in India. And now, since March last year, home has been his native Glasgow where he stands on the brink of taking little Queen’s Park in to the Scottish Premiership for the first time since the 1950s.
The job is not done yet. Having only won promotion from the third tier last year, Coyle and his team were denied automatic promotion to the Premiership on the final day last Friday when they lost an extraordinary winner-takes-all game 5-3 to Dundee. So tonight they host Partick Thistle in the second leg of a play-off tie they trail 4-3 after game one.
Queen’s Park’s own story is quite something. The oldest club in Scotland, they remained amateurs until 2019 and spent a century playing in front of a handful of supporters at Hampden Park. Currently they don’t have a home and have been playing matches at Falkirk, 20 miles away.
Their promotion would be quite something but this tale is less about them and more about their manager. Coyle is only 56 but is a grandfather who has spent his life in the game. He could, if he wished, be in his deckchair.
But this is the thing about career coaches. They don’t want to be sitting down. They wish to be standing out there on the grass with a whistle in their mouth and scattered through the English football pyramid we find other examples.
In League Two, the promotion tussle continues to be fascinating. At Bradford, Mark Hughes has chased automatic promotion all season but has settled instead for a place in the play-offs.
Once in charge of the world’s richest club and twice a striker for arguably the world’s most famous, I went to see the former Manchester City manager and United player in his office at Bradford’s training base last August.
Hughes, 59, had also fallen off the grid a little. He wanted work but couldn’t find it. So he swallowed his pride and started again at the bottom. At Bradford they train at a school and last season, when he joined, his kitman doubled up as his analyst.
Mark Hughes has managed to steer Bradford to a place in the League Two play-offs
But he still felt he had something to offer a sport that had been his life and after a season playing winning football in front of crowds of
